The first positive signs are coming from a personalized messenger RNA vaccine against the most common and aggressive form of pancreatic cancerknown as pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma: in phase I clinical trial resulted in a increase in the immune response of patients and has delayed recurrence, when used in combination with other treatments. The therapeutic vaccine, developed in a study published in the journal Nature and led by the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, is tailor-made for each individual, as it is based on the specific proteins produced by each one.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is the most common form of pancreatic cancer. It is a very aggressive pathology, with very low survival rates and a prognosis usually less than 5 years: a combination of surgical and other types of therapies can delay the recurrence somewhat, but with poor success rates. However, recent studies have shown that most patients with this type of cancer have high levels of new antigens, i.e. proteins located on the surface of cells that emerge on tumors following DNA mutations. These proteins, therefore, can become the target of personalized vaccine therapies, with the aim of improving the outcome of the treatments.
This is the path attempted by the researchers led by Luis Rojas and Zachary Sethna, who administered their mRna vaccine to 16 patients together with chemotherapy and immunotherapy, starting a phase I clinical trial. The purpose of this phase of the experimentation is above all to to study the safety of the drug and the presence of any side effects: for this reason the participants are usually healthy subjects, but in this case the authors of the study involved people who were already ill. The results show an increase in the immune response in 50% of the patients, also related to longer times of relapse after 18 months, while subjects who did not have improvements in the activity of the immune system experienced a worsening of the disease after an average of 13.4 months.
Source: Ansa
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